I voluntarily submit to struggle session. I have said, orally and in writing, that the Soviet Union was the better team in the 1972 Summit Series against Team Canada; that the only reason Team Canada won was because of their street-thug violence, instantiated by Frank Mahovlich’ mugging of Vladislav Tretiak and especially by Bobby Clarke’s vicious two-hand slash that broke Valeri Kharlamov's ankle. I have said and written that tiki-taka began in hockey, in this series, in the play of the Soviets, and that it revolutionized North American hockey. Only that last sentence is true. In Game Two play-by-play Foster Hewitt is heard describing the Soviet style as he did in Game One and was to do in Game Four:
A few years ago I watched, or thought I had, the entire eight games in the series. If so I must have been asleep when I watched Game Two in Toronto, won by Team Canada 4-1.
They are the greatest hockey team I have ever seen play and this was the greatest hockey game I ever saw played. Team Canada coach Harry Sinden made wholesale lineup changes for Game Two and had clearly studied the film from Game One in which T.C. was made dizzy and exhausted chasing the bees of the Soviet Union. He instructed his players on three things: skate like you have jets on your feet; skate vertically, in constant attack; and use your size advantage, ~10 lbs/man, and lean on the Soviets. They did all three. It was a clean, but hard-checking, game and while the Soviets gave as good as they had they could not give as good as they got. T.C.'s physicality wore down the Soviets.
My abiding interest in these games was historical. The aesthetics of Soviet “tic-tac-toe” were the only aesthetics that made an impression on me. That is, before I watched Game Two.
I here link to the Youtube video of the entire game with full awareness that no one is ever going to watch two hours of a hockey game played forty-nine years ago: not for its historical importance; nor for the sublime Soviet play that revolutionized North American hockey; nor, most sadly, for the Canadians transcendent aesthetic brilliance. But all of that is what Game Two was, in a nutshell, the greatest game ever played by the greatest team ever to play it: Team Canada.
